Erin Sarofsky and her team at creative production company Sarofsky Corp have created an illustrated world for the alcohol beverage brand Mike's Hard Lemonade.

Commissioned by the brand and Chicago-based creative agency Trisect, the spot is in a deceptively simple illustration style, a seamless piece of animation that flows without ever moving the actual product.

"Mike's is a fun and irreverent brand, so our goal was to showcase that with all the little details we added," said Erin Sarofsky. "We guarantee that you will see something new every time you watch it."

"We set out to tell a story about the high-quality ingredients that make a mike's hard lemonade so refreshing," said Sanjiv Gajiwala, VP of Marketing for Mike's Hard Lemonade. "Rather than show sweeping shots of verdant lemon groves, we chose to capture this story in a way as unexpected as the brand itself."

"Our creative approach on this job was to give movement to a static bottle by creating a fun animated world around it," added John Filipkowski, Sarofsky's creative director. "We kept the illustration style and colour palette very minimal, which allowed us to let the hero bottle, as well as all of the personalities of our characters, shine."

Although the animated characters and world Sarofsky's artists created were obviously central to the project, so was the original HD product cinematography of the hero bottle. The footage was captured tabletop-style in Sarofsky's in-house studio using an Arri Alexa.

Sarofsky's artists created their characters and worlds using Illustrator, then imported the vector artwork using various puppet tools and inverse kinematic rigs to infuse them with life and personality.

Live-action passes were graded in the company's Smoke suite, and additional animated elements created using Cinema 4D and Maya.Nuke was used for compositing and clean-up, while final animations and composites were then finished using After Effects.

"Producing a project like this entirely in-house from beginning to end is especially great for us," concluded Sarofsky. "We love how it turned out, and we all look forward to continuing our relationship with Mike's and Trisect."